zabbo

Work began this week on our project to clean up the upstairs office. This will be our only major project for the season and we’re hoping to get it done in time to enjoy most of the summer. We don’t have the energy for a repeat performance of last summer with the painting and the bathrooms and the ugh.

The original idea for the office was simple. When we bought the house the office was finished not with something reasonable, like sheetrock, but with reversed cedar planks. The side of the planks that faced the room were rough and only sort of painted. If you brushed up against them they’d catch your clothes. Replacing that nonsense with a normal surface was the driver for the project. Along for the ride came sanding and finishing the floors, trimming out the room to match most of the house, insulating while we had the walls open, and of course painting. We love painting.

That was the original idea, anyway. The stairs that lead to the office came up through a small enclosed space that was sandwiched between the walls of either bedroom. Alice never liked that it felt so cramped and that the walls above the stairs themselves were pretty useless. She made the clever suggestion that we knock down the wall that seperated the stairwell from the office. This creates more of a loft office that the stairs come into and that our bedroom happens to hang off of.

So that’s what we went for. The wall was flimsy and not holding anything up so it was easy to tear out. Now when you come up the stairs you get a nice view into the office. Light actually flows into the stairwell via the office windows.

I’m still fascinated by getting to peer into the dirty guts of this old house. The highlight photo along side this post features the dirty old chimney in the center. It was painted white but gunk (roofing tar?) seems to have made inroads at some point in the past. It’s fun to see fir floor boards all over the place up there. The entire upper floor was built from them and the extra bits were used as scraps for framing the walls. The crawl spaces look like they haven’t been touched since the knee walls first hid them away from the main space.

Next week: electrician and sheet rock ninjas. Here’s to hoping.